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peace settles in

Peace settles in. To be disrupted, I am sure. But for now, peace settles in. Today is the last day I will 'go' to work. My office will be the dining room. I will take in the sunshine and the plants on the windowsill. Put away The Winter House supplies and make a classroom, of sorts.

But peace settles in. The thing we feared would happen has happened. We may no longer after today enter the building. A ghost town, but not. The bells. The helpers. The roar of the Kubota across the parking lot. The laugh of the conversation held from me in my classroom this week with the maintenance men outside the screened window is now one if my favorite memories. The indomitable human spirit.

Now it is time to get on with the dealing of it. And in the end it is not a terrible thing to fear. Good heavens arent we all learning there are worse things to fear than learning a new skill? It is just new, up until last week I didn't know how to be this kind of a teacher. Lord, I don't even remember what I worried about the week before that.

But peace settles in. I love my life so much--I forget sometimes the little parts that make up such a beloved whole. The pops in the floors as you walk over certain spots. The blue-gray of a sun-just-rising living room. Will, God thank you, Will coming home.

Maggie, smiling and cheerful today, pleased to tackle the weight of this pandemic burden. "The world telling me to slow down," she says. "And chill. Get back, get right with myself."

And I feel it too. I feel the motion, the momentum. I feel the ebb and the flow. I rise with the grief when it comes and then breathe to release when it goes.

I call to me all the things I have set down in a fury of busy this year. I allow silence to fill up the spaces between. I contemplate seeds, cabbage plants, emails. I think about all the things--like rocks on a pond, skipped over. And peace settles in.

I record. I think ahead. While I mix, blend, jar, label. Soap and lotion need to be made. The future, a hope I still believe in. The spring still waits. And if my dinner time prayers for farmers are answered, then the farmers market will still open.

Pray for the farmers. The doctors. The scientists. The teachers, the parents. The tired, the overwhelmed, the fearful. Pray for the children.

None of us will leave these moments the same. And maybe that's okay. "Maybe we trusted ourselves too much," I said to Maggie in the car today. Our human rank. Our systems. Our priorities. Or maybe not. Maybe I'm wrong, I often am. Still. Peace settles in.

"Go placidly amid the noise and haste," says the poem, my morning read, "and remember what peace there may be in silence."

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